Cardiff based Peacocks stores are shutting. Potential loss of 24,000 jobs, nationally.
Paging Boris supporters, any retraining ideas?
That's the Edinburgh Woolen Mill, the EWM is parent of a lot of different brands.
A lot of shops on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh seem to be either them or virtually identikit tourist tat retail that all seem to stock the same stuff - are those them too?
Probably. It used to be that in Pitlochry there was an EWM and 2 doors dow to it is an "independent" shop that was also EWM owned.
But oddly enough there is a very similarly named shop which is apparently unrelated (on Princes St, and Dobbies Garden Centre in Lasswade, as oposed to the Other Kind on the Royal Mile). I wish I could remember which one it is as only one of them sells the Pringles jumpers I routinely wear!
I remember a joke from my youth along the lines of "what have a Pringles jumper and a clitoris got in common". I will leave others to deduce the punchline. (No offence intended - at the time the Pringles jumper was the garment of choice of local Neds).
PS What town was that in, might I ask, out of interest? (But ignore if not convenient.)
Blimey, the knife edge tipping point state of Texas looks in the bag for Trump. The elections is his.
You only want to see polls favourable to Biden? Blimey.
Thought you wanted the whole picture.
By the way, that's a bigger lead than Trump had over Clinton in that poll before 2016.
Again though, I guess, you only want facts favourable to Biden.
Biden isn't taking Texas.
There's been like a single poll lead in the state for Biden in the last 3 months.
A good thing to bear in mind though was that the 2016 Texas polls understated Trump by 2 in 2016 but missed Clinton by 5 points.
Nevertheless, I made a small profit by betting that Biden would take Texas a while back, and cashing out recently. Despite being a probably no-hope bet in terms of the eventual outcome, there is still money to be made.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
That is a barefaced lie, there is not one Scottish poster on here that ever claimed anything of the sort. Most that was ever said was that the number of deaths were circa 65% of England and wondered why and also why Scotland was much higher than Ireland at same time.
£20 for a days parking. I thought Yorkshire men were supposed to be tight. My grandad would have walked a 20 mile round trip into town than pay that sort of money.
The government is handling it badly, the opposition agrees with everything the govt does, then says it did it wrong - and the public think they both stink
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
I think it was due to posting in concert with betting markets which made it not only misleading but potentially financially ruinous.
You're allowed to post subsamples, so long as you clearly post 'This is a subsample'
Ah, thank you very much - I really had wondered.
Tories used to use 18 person subsamples to prove that they were going to be Scottish government and Ruthie would be FM.
Blimey, the knife edge tipping point state of Texas looks in the bag for Trump. The elections is his.
You only want to see polls favourable to Biden? Blimey.
Thought you wanted the whole picture.
By the way, that's a bigger lead than Trump had over Clinton in that poll before 2016.
Again though, I guess, you only want facts favourable to Biden.
Trump only being +5 in Texas is not a good poll for Trump...
It's consistent with a national Biden lead of 6 points, so it's one of the better polls for him in the last week - but, of course, there are so many polls that some will randomly be outliers in both directions.
Blimey, the knife edge tipping point state of Texas looks in the bag for Trump. The elections is his.
What's more worrying is that Florida is currently 5.8% more Trump-leaning than the country, according to 538 polling averages. That leaves Biden mostly relying on Pennsylvania (3.1% more Trump leaning than the country), and he probably can't afford to miss Wisconsin either (also 3.1% more Trumpy). You can basically take 3% off of any Biden national lead. American democracy is the number 1 democracy in the US.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
Much to my pleasure - but not the gent I have in mind, actually.
I enjoy Stuart's contributions, even the never ending ones about how victory for independence is inevitable given Unionists smug complacency but he was the one who got into trouble for that.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
I think it was due to posting in concert with betting markets which made it not only misleading but potentially financially ruinous.
You're allowed to post subsamples, so long as you clearly post 'This is a subsample'
Ah, thank you very much - I really had wondered.
Tories used to use 18 person subsamples to prove that they were going to be Scottish government and Ruthie would be FM.
It is still remarkable that apparently a quarter of Scots are still prepared to vote for such a clapped out moribund bunch of chancers that have f***ed up pretty much everything they have touched since getting a majority last year?
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
That is an indictment of a system of having partisan news channels.
Far better to have news channels that slag off the government from a variety of different standpoints, as they do here. Opinion polls show most people think the government is wrong, one way or another. If only they could agree on what is right, rather than what is wrong...
Yes although wrt to measures relating to the Pandemic the polls tell us that the public favour the harsh measures which much of the press are deriding on a daily basis. I do not think the media here have done a good job with their relentless nit-picking. Their current attacks on the scientists are reckless.
Good call from Starmer. It's important during this national crisis that Starmer doesn't create additional noise around the government's already confused messaging. But he'd be failing in his duty to hold them to account if he didn't point out their serial incompetence and try to help them correct their errors. The only real question is whether Labour would even want to inherit the smoking ruins of the economy in 2024.
Being in power is always better than not being in power. People said the same about winning in 2010, that maybe leaving Labour to clear up their mess was better than winning. It wasn't true then and it won't be in 2024.
And yet people still haven't forgiven the LDs for going into power when they had the chance.
Not quite. People haven't forgiven the LDs for picking a side, then going back on that, so nobody trusts them.
If you're in opposition you can get away with spendng decades saying to soft lefties "vote for us, we're not the Tories" and saying soft righties "vote for us, we're not Labour".
But in office they said to soft lefties "vote for us and we may align with the Tories" - and then by turning their back on what they'd done in office they said to soft righties "vote for us and we may align with Labour".
Ambiguity was a strength for them, now it is a weakness.
As I said, people haven't forgiven them for choosing to be in power. Nor have people understood the compromises required of a junior member of a coalition government.
I don't think it has much to do with 2010-2015. The LibDems were polling in the 20s less than 18 months ago. Instead, we are back to 2017: there are two entrenched blocks of voters in England and Wales right now, and they feed off each other. If you want to stop the Tories you choose Labour; and if you want to stop Labour you choose the Tories. I suspect that is the way it will remain for quite a while. And that spells big trouble for the LibDems.
I think it's difficult to set out your stall clearly on where you stand governing the country-wise if you are going through an 18-month leadership selection process. We have yet to hear how Sir Ed will position the LDs but I can forgive the electorate for thinking that the LDs haven't really cared about the world beyond the LDs for the past seeming age.
For understandable reasons, it's incredibly tough for anyone outside the government to get a hearing right now, Even Labour is struggling for regualr coverage beyond Starmer at PMQs. At some point that will change, so it could be that the LDs picked a good time to look internally. However, those two blocks look very entrenched to me. I think they will have to pick a side. They won't be able to play off both.
Starmer has had plenty of opportunity to get Labour's plan out there. Where is the Labour plan on rapid testing, the plan on increasing self isolation rates from 1 in 5 to something close to total, the plan on anything at all?
Blindly following government policy that has been proved to be a load of crap isn't good policy and Labour are still behind in the polls because of that. Starmer has a completely clear way to lay out what Labour would be doing differently and had a captive audience of the vast majority of people who think the country is heading in the wrong direction.
I disagree. Given where Labour were when he took over I think he has played it pretty well. I also think that Labour would have been getting a lot more airtime if we had not had the pandemic. By its nature it has been all consuming and because of that the government and its response is getting almost blanket coverage.
Not really, labour were 11 points behind at the election, now they are 3 points behind. That's against the most abject government we've had for many years. Labour have developed no alternative vision and keep sticking to siding with the government even though only 18% of people think the country is going in the right direction. The government is taking the nation down the wrong path and Labour are saying nothing about it.
Labour were as much as 26 points behind at the start of April. Again, I disagree that Labour is providing the government with unconditional support. But the fact that you have not noticed what it's been saying about issues like the furlough, cover for those not helped by the furlough, localised decision making on lockdowns, track and trace, etc - let alone issues beyond covid, such as selling UK farmers down the river, etc - makes my point for me.
No, the issue is that Labour have been saying nothing. The comparison to the 26 point lead is complete rubbish, it was never a real benchmark, just a rally round the flag effect of heading into a crisis. You're a Labour member, please outline Labour's alternative policy base vs what the government have been offering.
Labour are in opposition, they are not in government (except in Wales) they do not need an alternative Covid strategy.
I eagerly await Paul Davies' alternative strategy for Wales.
Starmer needs to because he needs to have a stock of ideas he can point to and say "I was right, Boris was wrong, vote for me". At the moment he just carps from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
It is absolutely farcical because his stock of ideas don't even need to work, since they won't be tested unless they're adopted by the Government. He has a blank cheque to write whatever alternative proposals he wants to make, what has he got to lose? If the Government adopts the ideas he can say that he was leading the way first. If the Government adopts them and they fail he can blame Government implementation. If the Government doesn't adopt them he has an alternative to point to saying "you should be doing this".
Madness. All I can think is that Starmer is is afraid of putting anything out.
He seems terribly afraid to say anything which might allow him to be associated with any policy choice - as evidenced by the abstentions in Parliament. He doesn’t want to vote for anything that might turn out to be bad, and doesn’t want to vote against anything that might turn out to be good.
Yes. Starmer is beginning to look utterly pointless. Being less crazy than Crazy-F*ck Jezbollah Corbyn can only get you so far. And it has got Starmer this far. But as every passes and he seems entirely clueless as to what to do about the pandemiic, other than say Oh I wouldn't do it like that- strongly resembling the asinine Harry Enfield character - Starmer's "popularity" will fall away.
He looks bland, sounds blander, and has nothing to say.
In the last week or so he has backed the 10pm curfew, criticised it, & abstained on the vote - that's the man for you
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Thats the lack of foreign tourists. Its not just sun-starved Brits deprived of their ability to go to Magaluf thats the problem, its absurdly expensive jumper-starved fat Americans
I am amazed they have 24K workers, I thought all the mills were closed and they cannot have that many shops. Where do they all work.
Under EWM, Peacocks and Ponden brands they must have at least 800 stores.
Add in all their EWM-in-disguuse shops and they must be going close to 1000 shops around the country.
Cheers Alistair , that is a lot of shops right enough. I did wonder how many cashmere sweaters you could sell.
Good call from Starmer. It's important during this national crisis that Starmer doesn't create additional noise around the government's already confused messaging. But he'd be failing in his duty to hold them to account if he didn't point out their serial incompetence and try to help them correct their errors. The only real question is whether Labour would even want to inherit the smoking ruins of the economy in 2024.
Being in power is always better than not being in power. People said the same about winning in 2010, that maybe leaving Labour to clear up their mess was better than winning. It wasn't true then and it won't be in 2024.
And yet people still haven't forgiven the LDs for going into power when they had the chance.
Not quite. People haven't forgiven the LDs for picking a side, then going back on that, so nobody trusts them.
If you're in opposition you can get away with spendng decades saying to soft lefties "vote for us, we're not the Tories" and saying soft righties "vote for us, we're not Labour".
But in office they said to soft lefties "vote for us and we may align with the Tories" - and then by turning their back on what they'd done in office they said to soft righties "vote for us and we may align with Labour".
Ambiguity was a strength for them, now it is a weakness.
As I said, people haven't forgiven them for choosing to be in power. Nor have people understood the compromises required of a junior member of a coalition government.
I don't think it has much to do with 2010-2015. The LibDems were polling in the 20s less than 18 months ago. Instead, we are back to 2017: there are two entrenched blocks of voters in England and Wales right now, and they feed off each other. If you want to stop the Tories you choose Labour; and if you want to stop Labour you choose the Tories. I suspect that is the way it will remain for quite a while. And that spells big trouble for the LibDems.
I think it's difficult to set out your stall clearly on where you stand governing the country-wise if you are going through an 18-month leadership selection process. We have yet to hear how Sir Ed will position the LDs but I can forgive the electorate for thinking that the LDs haven't really cared about the world beyond the LDs for the past seeming age.
For understandable reasons, it's incredibly tough for anyone outside the government to get a hearing right now, Even Labour is struggling for regualr coverage beyond Starmer at PMQs. At some point that will change, so it could be that the LDs picked a good time to look internally. However, those two blocks look very entrenched to me. I think they will have to pick a side. They won't be able to play off both.
Starmer has had plenty of opportunity to get Labour's plan out there. Where is the Labour plan on rapid testing, the plan on increasing self isolation rates from 1 in 5 to something close to total, the plan on anything at all?
Blindly following government policy that has been proved to be a load of crap isn't good policy and Labour are still behind in the polls because of that. Starmer has a completely clear way to lay out what Labour would be doing differently and had a captive audience of the vast majority of people who think the country is heading in the wrong direction.
I disagree. Given where Labour were when he took over I think he has played it pretty well. I also think that Labour would have been getting a lot more airtime if we had not had the pandemic. By its nature it has been all consuming and because of that the government and its response is getting almost blanket coverage.
Not really, labour were 11 points behind at the election, now they are 3 points behind. That's against the most abject government we've had for many years. Labour have developed no alternative vision and keep sticking to siding with the government even though only 18% of people think the country is going in the right direction. The government is taking the nation down the wrong path and Labour are saying nothing about it.
Labour were as much as 26 points behind at the start of April. Again, I disagree that Labour is providing the government with unconditional support. But the fact that you have not noticed what it's been saying about issues like the furlough, cover for those not helped by the furlough, localised decision making on lockdowns, track and trace, etc - let alone issues beyond covid, such as selling UK farmers down the river, etc - makes my point for me.
No, the issue is that Labour have been saying nothing. The comparison to the 26 point lead is complete rubbish, it was never a real benchmark, just a rally round the flag effect of heading into a crisis. You're a Labour member, please outline Labour's alternative policy base vs what the government have been offering.
Labour are in opposition, they are not in government (except in Wales) they do not need an alternative Covid strategy.
I eagerly await Paul Davies' alternative strategy for Wales.
Starmer needs to because he needs to have a stock of ideas he can point to and say "I was right, Boris was wrong, vote for me". At the moment he just carps from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
It is absolutely farcical because his stock of ideas don't even need to work, since they won't be tested unless they're adopted by the Government. He has a blank cheque to write whatever alternative proposals he wants to make, what has he got to lose? If the Government adopts the ideas he can say that he was leading the way first. If the Government adopts them and they fail he can blame Government implementation. If the Government doesn't adopt them he has an alternative to point to saying "you should be doing this".
Madness. All I can think is that Starmer is is afraid of putting anything out.
He seems terribly afraid to say anything which might allow him to be associated with any policy choice - as evidenced by the abstentions in Parliament. He doesn’t want to vote for anything that might turn out to be bad, and doesn’t want to vote against anything that might turn out to be good.
Yes. Starmer is beginning to look utterly pointless. Being less crazy than Crazy-F*ck Jezbollah Corbyn can only get you so far. And it has got Starmer this far. But as every passes and he seems entirely clueless as to what to do about the pandemiic, other than say Oh I wouldn't do it like that- strongly resembling the asinine Harry Enfield character - Starmer's "popularity" will fall away.
He looks bland, sounds blander, and has nothing to say.
People might take that as welcome relief, after suffering Bozo the clown for a good dose of time?
£20 for a days parking. I thought Yorkshire men were supposed to be tight. My grandad would have walked a 20 mile round trip into town than pay that sort of money.
Normally I used to park in the work car park but for about six months it was out of commission, so I had to use other car parks.
There were cheaper ones, but they were unmanned and populated by druggies, crack whores, general hookers, chavs, and kids drinking white lightning.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the punchline? It looks as though acquired immunity could wear off, anyway, and by the time we've all had it, it'll be about time to go through it all again.
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
(3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
Thank you; it's appreciated.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
Good call from Starmer. It's important during this national crisis that Starmer doesn't create additional noise around the government's already confused messaging. But he'd be failing in his duty to hold them to account if he didn't point out their serial incompetence and try to help them correct their errors. The only real question is whether Labour would even want to inherit the smoking ruins of the economy in 2024.
Being in power is always better than not being in power. People said the same about winning in 2010, that maybe leaving Labour to clear up their mess was better than winning. It wasn't true then and it won't be in 2024.
And yet people still haven't forgiven the LDs for going into power when they had the chance.
Not quite. People haven't forgiven the LDs for picking a side, then going back on that, so nobody trusts them.
If you're in opposition you can get away with spendng decades saying to soft lefties "vote for us, we're not the Tories" and saying soft righties "vote for us, we're not Labour".
But in office they said to soft lefties "vote for us and we may align with the Tories" - and then by turning their back on what they'd done in office they said to soft righties "vote for us and we may align with Labour".
Ambiguity was a strength for them, now it is a weakness.
As I said, people haven't forgiven them for choosing to be in power. Nor have people understood the compromises required of a junior member of a coalition government.
I don't think it has much to do with 2010-2015. The LibDems were polling in the 20s less than 18 months ago. Instead, we are back to 2017: there are two entrenched blocks of voters in England and Wales right now, and they feed off each other. If you want to stop the Tories you choose Labour; and if you want to stop Labour you choose the Tories. I suspect that is the way it will remain for quite a while. And that spells big trouble for the LibDems.
I think it's difficult to set out your stall clearly on where you stand governing the country-wise if you are going through an 18-month leadership selection process. We have yet to hear how Sir Ed will position the LDs but I can forgive the electorate for thinking that the LDs haven't really cared about the world beyond the LDs for the past seeming age.
For understandable reasons, it's incredibly tough for anyone outside the government to get a hearing right now, Even Labour is struggling for regualr coverage beyond Starmer at PMQs. At some point that will change, so it could be that the LDs picked a good time to look internally. However, those two blocks look very entrenched to me. I think they will have to pick a side. They won't be able to play off both.
Starmer has had plenty of opportunity to get Labour's plan out there. Where is the Labour plan on rapid testing, the plan on increasing self isolation rates from 1 in 5 to something close to total, the plan on anything at all?
Blindly following government policy that has been proved to be a load of crap isn't good policy and Labour are still behind in the polls because of that. Starmer has a completely clear way to lay out what Labour would be doing differently and had a captive audience of the vast majority of people who think the country is heading in the wrong direction.
I disagree. Given where Labour were when he took over I think he has played it pretty well. I also think that Labour would have been getting a lot more airtime if we had not had the pandemic. By its nature it has been all consuming and because of that the government and its response is getting almost blanket coverage.
Not really, labour were 11 points behind at the election, now they are 3 points behind. That's against the most abject government we've had for many years. Labour have developed no alternative vision and keep sticking to siding with the government even though only 18% of people think the country is going in the right direction. The government is taking the nation down the wrong path and Labour are saying nothing about it.
Labour were as much as 26 points behind at the start of April. Again, I disagree that Labour is providing the government with unconditional support. But the fact that you have not noticed what it's been saying about issues like the furlough, cover for those not helped by the furlough, localised decision making on lockdowns, track and trace, etc - let alone issues beyond covid, such as selling UK farmers down the river, etc - makes my point for me.
No, the issue is that Labour have been saying nothing. The comparison to the 26 point lead is complete rubbish, it was never a real benchmark, just a rally round the flag effect of heading into a crisis. You're a Labour member, please outline Labour's alternative policy base vs what the government have been offering.
Labour are in opposition, they are not in government (except in Wales) they do not need an alternative Covid strategy.
I eagerly await Paul Davies' alternative strategy for Wales.
Starmer needs to because he needs to have a stock of ideas he can point to and say "I was right, Boris was wrong, vote for me". At the moment he just carps from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
It is absolutely farcical because his stock of ideas don't even need to work, since they won't be tested unless they're adopted by the Government. He has a blank cheque to write whatever alternative proposals he wants to make, what has he got to lose? If the Government adopts the ideas he can say that he was leading the way first. If the Government adopts them and they fail he can blame Government implementation. If the Government doesn't adopt them he has an alternative to point to saying "you should be doing this".
Madness. All I can think is that Starmer is is afraid of putting anything out.
He seems terribly afraid to say anything which might allow him to be associated with any policy choice - as evidenced by the abstentions in Parliament. He doesn’t want to vote for anything that might turn out to be bad, and doesn’t want to vote against anything that might turn out to be good.
Yes. Starmer is beginning to look utterly pointless. Being less crazy than Crazy-F*ck Jezbollah Corbyn can only get you so far. And it has got Starmer this far. But as every passes and he seems entirely clueless as to what to do about the pandemiic, other than say Oh I wouldn't do it like that- strongly resembling the asinine Harry Enfield character - Starmer's "popularity" will fall away.
He looks bland, sounds blander, and has nothing to say.
People might take that as welcome relief, after suffering Bozo the clown for a good dose of time?
Well they might. There's not much recent form to support a dull LotO becoming PM though
That is an indictment of a system of having partisan news channels.
Good thing that nobody with the Prime Minister's ear thinks that would be a good id....
Bugger.
To be fair - Sky has pretty well lost the plot in this respect - though fortunately nobody watches it. I thin the BBC has recognised the dangers in its own service and has drawn backfrom the brink in this respect. Long may it continue. Channel 4? - like Sky and nobody watches it.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
Much to my pleasure - but not the gent I have in mind, actually.
I enjoy Stuart's contributions, even the never ending ones about how victory for independence is inevitable given Unionists smug complacency but he was the one who got into trouble for that.
He does disappear for long spells and pops up at odd times, posts frantically and then disappears. I do wonder if he really lives in Sweden.
What it seems to be is bad science reporting. Unless the intervals quoted have a pretty unusual definition, the numbers say that there's no significant* evidence that anything has changed. The true number could have been 1.3 last week and 1.5 this week (or, of course, outside those ranges).
Staying the same(ish) is better than getting worse, but of course the on the ground situation continues to get worse if R stays above 1.
For whatever 'sigificance' threshold is being used.
R is the rate at which things get worse or better.
So a stable R above 1 means "Things are getting worse at an accelerating rate, due to compounding" but not "Things are getting worse at an increasing rate, more than just compounding"
Cardiff based Peacocks stores are shutting. Potential loss of 24,000 jobs, nationally.
Paging Boris supporters, any retraining ideas?
That's the Edinburgh Woolen Mill, the EWM is parent of a lot of different brands.
A lot of shops on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh seem to be either them or virtually identikit tourist tat retail that all seem to stock the same stuff - are those them too?
Probably. It used to be that in Pitlochry there was an EWM and 2 doors dow to it is an "independent" shop that was also EWM owned.
But oddly enough there is a very similarly named shop which is apparently unrelated (on Princes St, and Dobbies Garden Centre in Lasswade, as oposed to the Other Kind on the Royal Mile). I wish I could remember which one it is as only one of them sells the Pringles jumpers I routinely wear!
I remember a joke from my youth along the lines of "what have a Pringles jumper and a clitoris got in common". I will leave others to deduce the punchline. (No offence intended - at the time the Pringles jumper was the garment of choice of local Neds).
PS What town was that in, might I ask, out of interest? (But ignore if not convenient.)
Good call from Starmer. It's important during this national crisis that Starmer doesn't create additional noise around the government's already confused messaging. But he'd be failing in his duty to hold them to account if he didn't point out their serial incompetence and try to help them correct their errors. The only real question is whether Labour would even want to inherit the smoking ruins of the economy in 2024.
Being in power is always better than not being in power. People said the same about winning in 2010, that maybe leaving Labour to clear up their mess was better than winning. It wasn't true then and it won't be in 2024.
And yet people still haven't forgiven the LDs for going into power when they had the chance.
Not quite. People haven't forgiven the LDs for picking a side, then going back on that, so nobody trusts them.
If you're in opposition you can get away with spendng decades saying to soft lefties "vote for us, we're not the Tories" and saying soft righties "vote for us, we're not Labour".
But in office they said to soft lefties "vote for us and we may align with the Tories" - and then by turning their back on what they'd done in office they said to soft righties "vote for us and we may align with Labour".
Ambiguity was a strength for them, now it is a weakness.
As I said, people haven't forgiven them for choosing to be in power. Nor have people understood the compromises required of a junior member of a coalition government.
I don't think it has much to do with 2010-2015. The LibDems were polling in the 20s less than 18 months ago. Instead, we are back to 2017: there are two entrenched blocks of voters in England and Wales right now, and they feed off each other. If you want to stop the Tories you choose Labour; and if you want to stop Labour you choose the Tories. I suspect that is the way it will remain for quite a while. And that spells big trouble for the LibDems.
I think it's difficult to set out your stall clearly on where you stand governing the country-wise if you are going through an 18-month leadership selection process. We have yet to hear how Sir Ed will position the LDs but I can forgive the electorate for thinking that the LDs haven't really cared about the world beyond the LDs for the past seeming age.
For understandable reasons, it's incredibly tough for anyone outside the government to get a hearing right now, Even Labour is struggling for regualr coverage beyond Starmer at PMQs. At some point that will change, so it could be that the LDs picked a good time to look internally. However, those two blocks look very entrenched to me. I think they will have to pick a side. They won't be able to play off both.
Starmer has had plenty of opportunity to get Labour's plan out there. Where is the Labour plan on rapid testing, the plan on increasing self isolation rates from 1 in 5 to something close to total, the plan on anything at all?
Blindly following government policy that has been proved to be a load of crap isn't good policy and Labour are still behind in the polls because of that. Starmer has a completely clear way to lay out what Labour would be doing differently and had a captive audience of the vast majority of people who think the country is heading in the wrong direction.
I disagree. Given where Labour were when he took over I think he has played it pretty well. I also think that Labour would have been getting a lot more airtime if we had not had the pandemic. By its nature it has been all consuming and because of that the government and its response is getting almost blanket coverage.
Not really, labour were 11 points behind at the election, now they are 3 points behind. That's against the most abject government we've had for many years. Labour have developed no alternative vision and keep sticking to siding with the government even though only 18% of people think the country is going in the right direction. The government is taking the nation down the wrong path and Labour are saying nothing about it.
Labour were as much as 26 points behind at the start of April. Again, I disagree that Labour is providing the government with unconditional support. But the fact that you have not noticed what it's been saying about issues like the furlough, cover for those not helped by the furlough, localised decision making on lockdowns, track and trace, etc - let alone issues beyond covid, such as selling UK farmers down the river, etc - makes my point for me.
No, the issue is that Labour have been saying nothing. The comparison to the 26 point lead is complete rubbish, it was never a real benchmark, just a rally round the flag effect of heading into a crisis. You're a Labour member, please outline Labour's alternative policy base vs what the government have been offering.
Labour are in opposition, they are not in government (except in Wales) they do not need an alternative Covid strategy.
I eagerly await Paul Davies' alternative strategy for Wales.
Starmer needs to because he needs to have a stock of ideas he can point to and say "I was right, Boris was wrong, vote for me". At the moment he just carps from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
It is absolutely farcical because his stock of ideas don't even need to work, since they won't be tested unless they're adopted by the Government. He has a blank cheque to write whatever alternative proposals he wants to make, what has he got to lose? If the Government adopts the ideas he can say that he was leading the way first. If the Government adopts them and they fail he can blame Government implementation. If the Government doesn't adopt them he has an alternative to point to saying "you should be doing this".
Madness. All I can think is that Starmer is is afraid of putting anything out.
He seems terribly afraid to say anything which might allow him to be associated with any policy choice - as evidenced by the abstentions in Parliament. He doesn’t want to vote for anything that might turn out to be bad, and doesn’t want to vote against anything that might turn out to be good.
Yes. Starmer is beginning to look utterly pointless. Being less crazy than Crazy-F*ck Jezbollah Corbyn can only get you so far. And it has got Starmer this far. But as every passes and he seems entirely clueless as to what to do about the pandemiic, other than say Oh I wouldn't do it like that- strongly resembling the asinine Harry Enfield character - Starmer's "popularity" will fall away.
He looks bland, sounds blander, and has nothing to say.
In the last week or so he has backed the 10pm curfew, criticised it, & abstained on the vote - that's the man for you
You never gave him a chance from day one , never a good thing to say about him. Nevertheless more fair minded people are thinking he is better than our current PM.
£20 for a days parking. I thought Yorkshire men were supposed to be tight. My grandad would have walked a 20 mile round trip into town than pay that sort of money.
Normally I used to park in the work car park but for about six months it was out of commission, so I had to use other car parks.
There were cheaper ones, but they were unmanned and populated by druggies, crack whores, general hookers, chavs, and kids drinking white lightning.
Paying the £20 to avoid them was worth it.
Car parks in big cities are printing money machines. Stick up some concrete and let the money roll in.
Good call from Starmer. It's important during this national crisis that Starmer doesn't create additional noise around the government's already confused messaging. But he'd be failing in his duty to hold them to account if he didn't point out their serial incompetence and try to help them correct their errors. The only real question is whether Labour would even want to inherit the smoking ruins of the economy in 2024.
Being in power is always better than not being in power. People said the same about winning in 2010, that maybe leaving Labour to clear up their mess was better than winning. It wasn't true then and it won't be in 2024.
And yet people still haven't forgiven the LDs for going into power when they had the chance.
Not quite. People haven't forgiven the LDs for picking a side, then going back on that, so nobody trusts them.
If you're in opposition you can get away with spendng decades saying to soft lefties "vote for us, we're not the Tories" and saying soft righties "vote for us, we're not Labour".
But in office they said to soft lefties "vote for us and we may align with the Tories" - and then by turning their back on what they'd done in office they said to soft righties "vote for us and we may align with Labour".
Ambiguity was a strength for them, now it is a weakness.
As I said, people haven't forgiven them for choosing to be in power. Nor have people understood the compromises required of a junior member of a coalition government.
I don't think it has much to do with 2010-2015. The LibDems were polling in the 20s less than 18 months ago. Instead, we are back to 2017: there are two entrenched blocks of voters in England and Wales right now, and they feed off each other. If you want to stop the Tories you choose Labour; and if you want to stop Labour you choose the Tories. I suspect that is the way it will remain for quite a while. And that spells big trouble for the LibDems.
I think it's difficult to set out your stall clearly on where you stand governing the country-wise if you are going through an 18-month leadership selection process. We have yet to hear how Sir Ed will position the LDs but I can forgive the electorate for thinking that the LDs haven't really cared about the world beyond the LDs for the past seeming age.
For understandable reasons, it's incredibly tough for anyone outside the government to get a hearing right now, Even Labour is struggling for regualr coverage beyond Starmer at PMQs. At some point that will change, so it could be that the LDs picked a good time to look internally. However, those two blocks look very entrenched to me. I think they will have to pick a side. They won't be able to play off both.
Starmer has had plenty of opportunity to get Labour's plan out there. Where is the Labour plan on rapid testing, the plan on increasing self isolation rates from 1 in 5 to something close to total, the plan on anything at all?
Blindly following government policy that has been proved to be a load of crap isn't good policy and Labour are still behind in the polls because of that. Starmer has a completely clear way to lay out what Labour would be doing differently and had a captive audience of the vast majority of people who think the country is heading in the wrong direction.
I disagree. Given where Labour were when he took over I think he has played it pretty well. I also think that Labour would have been getting a lot more airtime if we had not had the pandemic. By its nature it has been all consuming and because of that the government and its response is getting almost blanket coverage.
Not really, labour were 11 points behind at the election, now they are 3 points behind. That's against the most abject government we've had for many years. Labour have developed no alternative vision and keep sticking to siding with the government even though only 18% of people think the country is going in the right direction. The government is taking the nation down the wrong path and Labour are saying nothing about it.
Labour were as much as 26 points behind at the start of April. Again, I disagree that Labour is providing the government with unconditional support. But the fact that you have not noticed what it's been saying about issues like the furlough, cover for those not helped by the furlough, localised decision making on lockdowns, track and trace, etc - let alone issues beyond covid, such as selling UK farmers down the river, etc - makes my point for me.
No, the issue is that Labour have been saying nothing. The comparison to the 26 point lead is complete rubbish, it was never a real benchmark, just a rally round the flag effect of heading into a crisis. You're a Labour member, please outline Labour's alternative policy base vs what the government have been offering.
Labour are in opposition, they are not in government (except in Wales) they do not need an alternative Covid strategy.
I eagerly await Paul Davies' alternative strategy for Wales.
Starmer needs to because he needs to have a stock of ideas he can point to and say "I was right, Boris was wrong, vote for me". At the moment he just carps from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
It is absolutely farcical because his stock of ideas don't even need to work, since they won't be tested unless they're adopted by the Government. He has a blank cheque to write whatever alternative proposals he wants to make, what has he got to lose? If the Government adopts the ideas he can say that he was leading the way first. If the Government adopts them and they fail he can blame Government implementation. If the Government doesn't adopt them he has an alternative to point to saying "you should be doing this".
Madness. All I can think is that Starmer is is afraid of putting anything out.
He seems terribly afraid to say anything which might allow him to be associated with any policy choice - as evidenced by the abstentions in Parliament. He doesn’t want to vote for anything that might turn out to be bad, and doesn’t want to vote against anything that might turn out to be good.
Yes. Starmer is beginning to look utterly pointless. Being less crazy than Crazy-F*ck Jezbollah Corbyn can only get you so far. And it has got Starmer this far. But as every passes and he seems entirely clueless as to what to do about the pandemiic, other than say Oh I wouldn't do it like that- strongly resembling the asinine Harry Enfield character - Starmer's "popularity" will fall away.
He looks bland, sounds blander, and has nothing to say.
People might take that as welcome relief, after suffering Bozo the clown for a good dose of time?
Well they might. There's not much recent form to support a dull LotO becoming PM though
Starmer: Not new leadership but NO leadership.
One of the reasons why LAB is only level not 60% clear of this useless government which is where they should be!
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the punchline? It looks as though acquired immunity could wear off, anyway, and by the time we've all had it, it'll be about time to go through it all again.
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
(3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
Thank you; it's appreciated.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
Good posts Andy C. Don't agree with your entire analysis but it is better and more detailed than 90% of the stuff on, say, the BBC website, or in the broadsheets
One tale re testing. It is now pretty good in places. A close family member of mine needed a test last weekend. It was booked on Saturday evening, the test was done 10am next morning at a walk in centre, there was zero waiting time, the test took 15 minutes, the results were emailed within less than 24 hours: negative
Blood plasma from three Singaporeans who recovered from COVID-19 was used to treat U.S. President Donald Trump after he shocked the world by announcing he was infected with a disease he’d played down all year.
Trump was treated with antibodies obtained from plasma supplied by Singapore’s National Centre for Infectious Diseases while being treated at the Walter Reed Medical Center before he left Monday night, eastern U.S. time. It was unclear whether his infected wife, First Lady Melania Trump, received the same treatment.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the punchline? It looks as though acquired immunity could wear off, anyway, and by the time we've all had it, it'll be about time to go through it all again.
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
(3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
Thank you; it's appreciated.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
As @isam noted yesterday, it is a mischaracterisation to say that those who question lockdown are "let it rip" proponents.
Like most if not all social ills a program of education would be imo immensely helpful to aid compliance or adherence to best practice. As we all agree and have seen, people who care voluntarily adopt harsher measures and did so pre-official lockdown.
A campaign to explain what the transmission risks are, what can be done to minimise those risks, and what to do if you have symptoms would go a long way to help.
But don't we have those already? Well yes we do but we have them in the context of a near-infantilised population who, like infants everywhere, rebel against constrictions or "the rules" once they get half a chance to do so.
Relaunch the campaigns of information while telling the public you seek to trust them and perhaps you will get a different response.
LadyG, a problem is the distorting effect of bad news. If there's an equal quantity of bad and good news the bad gets much more attention. Partly this is a natural way of things, but it's also because the media include many irresponsible fools.
Apart from the Florida poll Biden should be pretty happy with the latest bunch. Trump is clearly ahead in Kansas and West Virginia (equivalent to Tories leading in Surrey) and both Texas and Florida are close, but otherwise it looks like a Biden rout at the moment:
"The NHS contact-tracing app for England and Wales has sent only one alert about an outbreak at a venue since its launch, despite being downloaded by 16 million people.
The app, which launched two weeks ago, has been used for millions of check-ins at restaurants, bars and pubs, where people scan a QR code at the entrance to the venue." (£)
LadyG, a problem is the distorting effect of bad news. If there's an equal quantity of bad and good news the bad gets much more attention. Partly this is a natural way of things, but it's also because the media include many irresponsible fools.
Can you give us the good news about Covid in the UK please Mr Dancer?
If Trump is doing so much worse with women, seniors and independents as multiple sources of data seem to indicate, then this is not going to be close at all. Watch out for MO and Alaska at this rate.
@malcolmg was right, I would be back but I think it's an important one
@kinabalu on the Trump odds, I think he will get more of a pounding in the polls in the next week or so, so I am looking for 5/2 or even 3/1 but I will take 2/1
I mentioned a few days back that one big thing to look out for was the audience numbers for the VP debate and whether they followed the same trends as the Presidential debate, which was down 13% from 2016. My point was that, if the VP trends did significantly better, it would suggests that the public was taking a lot more interest in the VP candidates as potential Presidents and therefore this was not just a Trump vs Biden race but would broaden to a greater focus on Pence and Harris as possible Presidents.
Well, the audience numbers have come in and the uplift from 2016 has been huge - so far, 59m have been counted as watching the VP debate, making it the 2nd most watched VP debate since 1976 and over 50% higher than the 2016 VP debate. It is even more remarkable when you consider that TV audiences have been declining across the board over the past several years and that the Presidential debate this time only generated a 70m audience.
My read on this is that punters are now only going to have to think about what voters are thinking about Trump and Biden, but put an important weighting to voters' views on Pence and Harris. My personal view - which many will disagree with - is that Pence is somewhat of a known entity, the interesting one will be how many undecideds will be comfortable with the prospect of a President Harris.
I agree that more people are paying attention to the VPs this time given the age/health of the 2 main players and that was reflected in higher viewing figures.
Where I disagree is that you seem to be assuming that this all works to the GOP's advantage whereas the only two national polls I've seen on the VP debate both had Harris ahead by some way, hugely so amongst women. Your evidence to the contrary seems to rest on a focus group run by Frank Luntz, a well known professional Republican strategist.
Do you have anything other than "gut feelings" to substantiate the idea that those watching preferred Pence?
"The NHS contact-tracing app for England and Wales has sent only one alert about an outbreak at a venue since its launch, despite being downloaded by 16 million people.
The app, which launched two weeks ago, has been used for millions of check-ins at restaurants, bars and pubs, where people scan a QR code at the entrance to the venue." (£)
Just been able to download it , as me and the wife moved up from a I phone 6.Where it would not work to an i phone 8. Only one alert after 16 million downloads does seem to be world beating.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
LadyG, a problem is the distorting effect of bad news. If there's an equal quantity of bad and good news the bad gets much more attention. Partly this is a natural way of things, but it's also because the media include many irresponsible fools.
Can you give us the good news about Covid in the UK please Mr Dancer?
Some middle class people saved a tenner on their meal out.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the punchline? It looks as though acquired immunity could wear off, anyway, and by the time we've all had it, it'll be about time to go through it all again.
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
(3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
Thank you; it's appreciated.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
As @isam noted yesterday, it is a mischaracterisation to say that those who question lockdown are "let it rip" proponents.
Like most if not all social ills a program of education would be imo immensely helpful to aid compliance or adherence to best practice. As we all agree and have seen, people who care voluntarily adopt harsher measures and did so pre-official lockdown.
A campaign to explain what the transmission risks are, what can be done to minimise those risks, and what to do if you have symptoms would go a long way to help.
But don't we have those already? Well yes we do but we have them in the context of a near-infantilised population who, like infants everywhere, rebel against constrictions or "the rules" once they get half a chance to do so.
Relaunch the campaigns of information while telling the public you seek to trust them and perhaps you will get a different response.
"...it is a mischaracterisation to say that those who question lockdown are "let it rip" proponents."
Well, yes. That's why I considered the constant rate infection options (de facto and de jure restrictions). Some are, however - the ones who say "remove restrictions for the young while protecting the old separately" - that definitely is "let it rip among the young."
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the punchline? It looks as though acquired immunity could wear off, anyway, and by the time we've all had it, it'll be about time to go through it all again.
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
(3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
Thank you; it's appreciated.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
As @isam noted yesterday, it is a mischaracterisation to say that those who question lockdown are "let it rip" proponents.
Like most if not all social ills a program of education would be imo immensely helpful to aid compliance or adherence to best practice. As we all agree and have seen, people who care voluntarily adopt harsher measures and did so pre-official lockdown.
A campaign to explain what the transmission risks are, what can be done to minimise those risks, and what to do if you have symptoms would go a long way to help.
But don't we have those already? Well yes we do but we have them in the context of a near-infantilised population who, like infants everywhere, rebel against constrictions or "the rules" once they get half a chance to do so.
Relaunch the campaigns of information while telling the public you seek to trust them and perhaps you will get a different response.
Indeed, thank you.
Just as it is a mischaracterisation (plain wrong in fact) to say Peter Hitchens refuses to accept the restrictions and encourages people to break them - in fact he complies with them whilst remaining critical, and says others should too. He is critical of the loony fringe of lockdown sceptics/conspiracy theorists, and says they hurt his cause.
LadyG, a problem is the distorting effect of bad news. If there's an equal quantity of bad and good news the bad gets much more attention. Partly this is a natural way of things, but it's also because the media include many irresponsible fools.
Can you give us the good news about Covid in the UK please Mr Dancer?
Pollution is down, people are rethinking the whole commute to work thing, more quality time with the family ...
It is actually quite a long list if you bother to take the time to reflect and think. Granted, the positives come nowhere near to matching the negatives, but that fact does not negate the fact that there are positives if we can just be bothered to see and grasp them.
Blood plasma from three Singaporeans who recovered from COVID-19 was used to treat U.S. President Donald Trump after he shocked the world by announcing he was infected with a disease he’d played down all year.
Trump was treated with antibodies obtained from plasma supplied by Singapore’s National Centre for Infectious Diseases while being treated at the Walter Reed Medical Center before he left Monday night, eastern U.S. time. It was unclear whether his infected wife, First Lady Melania Trump, received the same treatment.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
The magic money forest is getting another seeing to.
Given that the government has wasted a HUGE amount of money on untargeted measures, Rishi's proposals today seem reasonably sensible.
A pity the Government can't work out that closing hospitality isn't going to help reduce the rate, given the lack of evidence that hospitality significantly spreads COVID
@malcolmg was right, I would be back but I think it's an important one
@kinabalu on the Trump odds, I think he will get more of a pounding in the polls in the next week or so, so I am looking for 5/2 or even 3/1 but I will take 2/1
I mentioned a few days back that one big thing to look out for was the audience numbers for the VP debate and whether they followed the same trends as the Presidential debate, which was down 13% from 2016. My point was that, if the VP trends did significantly better, it would suggests that the public was taking a lot more interest in the VP candidates as potential Presidents and therefore this was not just a Trump vs Biden race but would broaden to a greater focus on Pence and Harris as possible Presidents.
Well, the audience numbers have come in and the uplift from 2016 has been huge - so far, 59m have been counted as watching the VP debate, making it the 2nd most watched VP debate since 1976 and over 50% higher than the 2016 VP debate. It is even more remarkable when you consider that TV audiences have been declining across the board over the past several years and that the Presidential debate this time only generated a 70m audience.
My read on this is that punters are now only going to have to think about what voters are thinking about Trump and Biden, but put an important weighting to voters' views on Pence and Harris. My personal view - which many will disagree with - is that Pence is somewhat of a known entity, the interesting one will be how many undecideds will be comfortable with the prospect of a President Harris.
I agree that more people are paying attention to the VPs this time given the age/health of the 2 main players and that was reflected in higher viewing figures.
Where I disagree is that you seem to be assuming that this all works to the GOP's advantage whereas the only two national polls I've seen on the VP debate both had Harris ahead by some way, hugely so amongst women. Your evidence to the contrary seems to rest on a focus group run by Frank Luntz, a well known professional Republican strategist.
Do you have anything other than "gut feelings" to substantiate the idea that those watching preferred Pence?
There was one poll recently for a theoretical Pence-Harris matchup. It put them level in Florida and Harris up 6 nationwide.
On the face of it that's a lot better than the Trump-Biden polls.
However, at the moment (fingers crossed) Biden doesn't have the virus. Trump does. So the matchup that might count is Pence-Biden. But we don't know if Biden's vote is more an anti-Trump vote than Trump's is a personal pro-Trump vote.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
Cough. There was a time on PB where even mentioning, shall we say, Caledonian crosssections, was a goldleafed invitation to the man with the ban hammer.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the punchline? It looks as though acquired immunity could wear off, anyway, and by the time we've all had it, it'll be about time to go through it all again.
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
(3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
Thank you; it's appreciated.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
Good posts Andy C. Don't agree with your entire analysis but it is better and more detailed than 90% of the stuff on, say, the BBC website, or in the broadsheets
One tale re testing. It is now pretty good in places. A close family member of mine needed a test last weekend. It was booked on Saturday evening, the test was done 10am next morning at a walk in centre, there was zero waiting time, the test took 15 minutes, the results were emailed within less than 24 hours: negative
It was really rather efficient.
Thanks, LadyG. Testing is the route to living with it, if we need to for a prolonged period. I think that results need to be available within an hour if possible (because that allows a lot more things to be possible) and even more widely available.
But from everything I've read on the vaccine effort, we WILL get a working and workable vaccine. By the end of next summer, we'll probably be able to pick and choose vaccines for ease of administration, availability, efficacy, and minimalisation of side effects.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the punchline? It looks as though acquired immunity could wear off, anyway, and by the time we've all had it, it'll be about time to go through it all again.
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
(3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
Thank you; it's appreciated.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
As @isam noted yesterday, it is a mischaracterisation to say that those who question lockdown are "let it rip" proponents.
Like most if not all social ills a program of education would be imo immensely helpful to aid compliance or adherence to best practice. As we all agree and have seen, people who care voluntarily adopt harsher measures and did so pre-official lockdown.
A campaign to explain what the transmission risks are, what can be done to minimise those risks, and what to do if you have symptoms would go a long way to help.
But don't we have those already? Well yes we do but we have them in the context of a near-infantilised population who, like infants everywhere, rebel against constrictions or "the rules" once they get half a chance to do so.
Relaunch the campaigns of information while telling the public you seek to trust them and perhaps you will get a different response.
Indeed, thank you.
Just as it is a mischaracterisation (plain wrong in fact) to say Peter Hitchens refuses to accept the restrictions and encourages people to break them - in fact he complies with them whilst remaining critical, and says others should too. He is critical of the loony fringe of lockdown sceptics/conspiracy theorists, and says they hurt his cause.
£20 for a days parking. I thought Yorkshire men were supposed to be tight. My grandad would have walked a 20 mile round trip into town than pay that sort of money.
Normally I used to park in the work car park but for about six months it was out of commission, so I had to use other car parks.
There were cheaper ones, but they were unmanned and populated by druggies, crack whores, general hookers, chavs, and kids drinking white lightning.
Paying the £20 to avoid them was worth it.
Car parks in big cities are printing money machines. Stick up some concrete and let the money roll in.
I use JustPark (other people's driveways) routinely - works well and usually cheap. You enter the postcode that you want and it offers you a choice of nearby places, with photos and description and prices.
I use JustPark (other people's driveways) routinely - works well and usually cheap. You enter the postcode that you want and it offers you a choice of nearby places, with photos and description and prices.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscrae looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the pu (3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
Thank you; it's appreciated.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
Good posts Andy C. Don't agree with your entire analysis but it is better and more detailed than 90% of the stuff on, say, the BBC website, or in the broadsheets
One tale re testing. It is now pretty good in places. A close family member of mine needed a test last weekend. It was booked on Saturday evening, the test was done 10am next morning at a walk in centre, there was zero waiting time, the test took 15 minutes, the results were emailed within less than 24 hours: negative
It was really rather efficient.
Thanks, LadyG. Testing is the route to living with it, if we need to for a prolonged period. I think that results need to be available within an hour if possible (because that allows a lot more things to be possible) and even more widely available.
But from everything I've read on the vaccine effort, we WILL get a working and workable vaccine. By the end of next summer, we'll probably be able to pick and choose vaccines for ease of administration, availability, efficacy, and minimalisation of side effects.
Yes, absent good, globally available vaccines, the magic bullet is probably universal testing, with results returned in minutes. Basically: instant
Then you can be given your daily I AM CLEAN visa, and you are allowed to work, go to the pub, attend school or uni, keep the economy going,
It will be a bit shit for those who test positive, but then it is shit for everyone already
Rishi effectively extends the furlough scheme from the 1st November for businesses closed by regulations but at a two third rate plus upto £3,000 per month for businesses effected
The scheme to last for six months
Seems very generous but no doubt some will say it is not enough
I use JustPark (other people's driveways) routinely - works well and usually cheap. You enter the postcode that you want and it offers you a choice of nearby places, with photos and description and prices.
I have used that successfully in London
It's also good for Cheltenham and Ascot, should those events ever accept spectators again.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the punchline? It looks as though acquired immunity could wear off, anyway, and by the time we've all had it, it'll be about time to go through it all again.
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
(3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
Thank you; it's appreciated.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
Good posts Andy C. Don't agree with your entire analysis but it is better and more detailed than 90% of the stuff on, say, the BBC website, or in the broadsheets
One tale re testing. It is now pretty good in places. A close family member of mine needed a test last weekend. It was booked on Saturday evening, the test was done 10am next morning at a walk in centre, there was zero waiting time, the test took 15 minutes, the results were emailed within less than 24 hours: negative
It was really rather efficient.
Thanks, LadyG. Testing is the route to living with it, if we need to for a prolonged period. I think that results need to be available within an hour if possible (because that allows a lot more things to be possible) and even more widely available.
But from everything I've read on the vaccine effort, we WILL get a working and workable vaccine. By the end of next summer, we'll probably be able to pick and choose vaccines for ease of administration, availability, efficacy, and minimalisation of side effects.
Best case scenario: the economy in most of the country north of the Severn-Wash line will be in ruins by next Summer.
Worst case scenario: we all end up back in lockdown until Easter, and any old people saved from Covid die of starvation when their pensions stop being paid.
The Government bet the farm on suppression. It lost, and the bailiffs have arrived at the gate. This is over. We're finished.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
Rishi effectively extends the furlough scheme from the 1st November for businesses closed by regulations but at a two third rate plus upto £3,000 per month for businesses effected
The scheme to last for six months
Seems very generous but no doubt some will say it is not enough
There are some people - many people in fact - who just want the government to pay for everything
Taking self responsibility and accountability just seems to be a diminishing characteristic in this country.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
The premier league has announced that they are showing games that were not to be show live on TV. They will now be on Sky box office and Bt box office for £14.95. Do not know how successful that will be as people already pay a lot to watch through their normal subscription.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
The premier league has announced that they are showing games that were not to be show live on TV. They will now be on Sky box office and Bt box office for £14.95. Do not know how successful that will be as people already pay a lot to watch through their normal subscription.
I will not pay anymore to Sky or BT for my sports packages
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
The premier league has announced that they are showing games that were not to be show live on TV. They will now be on Sky box office and Bt box office for £14.95. Do not know how successful that will be as people already pay a lot to watch through their normal subscription.
I will not pay anymore to Sky or BT for my sports packages
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
Good call from Starmer. It's important during this national crisis that Starmer doesn't create additional noise around the government's already confused messaging. But he'd be failing in his duty to hold them to account if he didn't point out their serial incompetence and try to help them correct their errors. The only real question is whether Labour would even want to inherit the smoking ruins of the economy in 2024.
Being in power is always better than not being in power. People said the same about winning in 2010, that maybe leaving Labour to clear up their mess was better than winning. It wasn't true then and it won't be in 2024.
And yet people still haven't forgiven the LDs for going into power when they had the chance.
Not quite. People haven't forgiven the LDs for picking a side, then going back on that, so nobody trusts them.
If you're in opposition you can get away with spendng decades saying to soft lefties "vote for us, we're not the Tories" and saying soft righties "vote for us, we're not Labour".
But in office they said to soft lefties "vote for us and we may align with the Tories" - and then by turning their back on what they'd done in office they said to soft righties "vote for us and we may align with Labour".
Ambiguity was a strength for them, now it is a weakness.
As I said, people haven't forgiven them for choosing to be in power. Nor have people understood the compromises required of a junior member of a coalition government.
I don't think it has much to do with 2010-2015. The LibDems were polling in the 20s less than 18 months ago. Instead, we are back to 2017: there are two entrenched blocks of voters in England and Wales right now, and they feed off each other. If you want to stop the Tories you choose Labour; and if you want to stop Labour you choose the Tories. I suspect that is the way it will remain for quite a while. And that spells big trouble for the LibDems.
I think it's difficult to set out your stall clearly on where you stand governing the country-wise if you are going through an 18-month leadership selection process. We have yet to hear how Sir Ed will position the LDs but I can forgive the electorate for thinking that the LDs haven't really cared about the world beyond the LDs for the past seeming age.
For understandable reasons, it's incredibly tough for anyone outside the government to get a hearing right now, Even Labour is struggling for regualr coverage beyond Starmer at PMQs. At some point that will change, so it could be that the LDs picked a good time to look internally. However, those two blocks look very entrenched to me. I think they will have to pick a side. They won't be able to play off both.
Starmer has had plenty of opportunity to get Labour's plan out there. Where is the Labour plan on rapid testing, the plan on increasing self isolation rates from 1 in 5 to something close to total, the plan on anything at all?
Blindly following government policy that has been proved to be a load of crap isn't good policy and Labour are still behind in the polls because of that. Starmer has a completely clear way to lay out what Labour would be doing differently and had a captive audience of the vast majority of people who think the country is heading in the wrong direction.
I disagree. Given where Labour were when he took over I think he has played it pretty well. I also think that Labour would have been getting a lot more airtime if we had not had the pandemic. By its nature it has been all consuming and because of that the government and its response is getting almost blanket coverage.
Not really, labour were 11 points behind at the election, now they are 3 points behind. That's against the most abject government we've had for many years. Labour have developed no alternative vision and keep sticking to siding with the government even though only 18% of people think the country is going in the right direction. The government is taking the nation down the wrong path and Labour are saying nothing about it.
Labour were as much as 26 points behind at the start of April. Again, I disagree that Labour is providing the government with unconditional support. But the fact that you have not noticed what it's been saying about issues like the furlough, cover for those not helped by the furlough, localised decision making on lockdowns, track and trace, etc - let alone issues beyond covid, such as selling UK farmers down the river, etc - makes my point for me.
No, the issue is that Labour have been saying nothing. The comparison to the 26 point lead is complete rubbish, it was never a real benchmark, just a rally round the flag effect of heading into a crisis. You're a Labour member, please outline Labour's alternative policy base vs what the government have been offering.
Labour are in opposition, they are not in government (except in Wales) they do not need an alternative Covid strategy.
I eagerly await Paul Davies' alternative strategy for Wales.
Starmer needs to because he needs to have a stock of ideas he can point to and say "I was right, Boris was wrong, vote for me". At the moment he just carps from the sidelines with the benefit of hindsight.
It is absolutely farcical because his stock of ideas don't even need to work, since they won't be tested unless they're adopted by the Government. He has a blank cheque to write whatever alternative proposals he wants to make, what has he got to lose? If the Government adopts the ideas he can say that he was leading the way first. If the Government adopts them and they fail he can blame Government implementation. If the Government doesn't adopt them he has an alternative to point to saying "you should be doing this".
Madness. All I can think is that Starmer is is afraid of putting anything out.
He seems terribly afraid to say anything which might allow him to be associated with any policy choice - as evidenced by the abstentions in Parliament. He doesn’t want to vote for anything that might turn out to be bad, and doesn’t want to vote against anything that might turn out to be good.
Yes. Starmer is beginning to look utterly pointless. Being less crazy than Crazy-F*ck Jezbollah Corbyn can only get you so far. And it has got Starmer this far. But as every passes and he seems entirely clueless as to what to do about the pandemiic, other than say Oh I wouldn't do it like that- strongly resembling the asinine Harry Enfield character - Starmer's "popularity" will fall away.
He looks bland, sounds blander, and has nothing to say.
In the last week or so he has backed the 10pm curfew, criticised it, & abstained on the vote - that's the man for you
You never gave him a chance from day one , never a good thing to say about him. Nevertheless more fair minded people are thinking he is better than our current PM.
I am still willing to be convinced - and I don't even mind, personally, that he is boring - I would happily vote for a competent bore. I just don't think I am representative of voters in general in that respect.
But it has to be said that he offers no solutions, just criticises his opposite number - we need more than that
The premier league has announced that they are showing games that were not to be show live on TV. They will now be on Sky box office and Bt box office for £14.95. Do not know how successful that will be as people already pay a lot to watch through their normal subscription.
I will not pay anymore to Sky or BT for my sports packages
It also seems highly likely that with the impending reduction in earnings, notwithstanding the government schemes, Sky and BT may well see big drops in their subscription numbers anyway
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
The magic money forest is getting another seeing to.
Plus upto £3,000 per month grant to businesses asked to close
There is no way this is going to be a fortnights closure.
Five million unemployed by Christmas. Minimum.
I doubt it. Furloughed but not unemployed.
LOL. If you think all these businesses can keep limping along indefinitely on Government life support then I have a garden bridge to sell you.
These lockdowns tend to follow a pattern. Outbreak occurs, testing squads descend, more disease found, restrictions applied, more testing, more disease, restrictions tightened again, etc., etc. To borrow a term I read elsewhere, it becomes Hotel California lockdown - you get into it, you never leave.
If - when - the hospitality trade in the whole of Northern England finds it has no date for reopening but it's unlikely to be before May 2021, then it just rolls over and dies. End of story.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
The magic money forest is getting another seeing to.
Plus upto £3,000 per month grant to businesses asked to close
There is no way this is going to be a fortnights closure.
Five million unemployed by Christmas. Minimum.
I doubt it. Furloughed but not unemployed.
LOL. If you think all these businesses can keep limping along indefinitely on Government life support then I have a garden bridge to sell you.
These lockdowns tend to follow a pattern. Outbreak occurs, testing squads descend, more disease found, restrictions applied, more testing, more disease, restrictions tightened again, etc., etc. To borrow a term I read elsewhere, it becomes Hotel California lockdown - you get into it, you never leave.
If - when - the hospitality trade in the whole of Northern England finds it has no date for reopening but it's unlikely to be before May 2021, then it just rolls over and dies. End of story.
Yet there are miles more people in hospital that is not explained by more testing.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
The magic money forest is getting another seeing to.
Plus upto £3,000 per month grant to businesses asked to close
There is no way this is going to be a fortnights closure.
Five million unemployed by Christmas. Minimum.
I doubt it. Furloughed but not unemployed.
LOL. If you think all these businesses can keep limping along indefinitely on Government life support then I have a garden bridge to sell you.
These lockdowns tend to follow a pattern. Outbreak occurs, testing squads descend, more disease found, restrictions applied, more testing, more disease, restrictions tightened again, etc., etc. To borrow a term I read elsewhere, it becomes Hotel California lockdown - you get into it, you never leave.
If - when - the hospitality trade in the whole of Northern England finds it has no date for reopening but it's unlikely to be before May 2021, then it just rolls over and dies. End of story.
Likewise Scotland, Wales, Ulster, central London. Fucked. The entire tourist industry: shagged.
There is a danger that we will tip into an economic death spiral, as bankruptcy causes defaults which causes more bankruptcy which.....
The Extreme Worst Case Scenario.
And even as I write this, cold, torrential, apocalyptic rain has just started falling on north London
In other news, I totally missed this...I can't imagine they will have much of a business if you can only get a vodaphone contract, when the whole point of CW was a one-stop shop that you could choose from a large array of network / tariff.
EE phone deals are no longer available at Carphone Warehouse - here are some alternatives
Who's on board for this exciting new financial services offer? I might sell all my cars and get on board with some magic bean futures.
Sometimes I really start looking for the universe's on/off switch.
Some scientists believe that we are all really living in some kind of computer simulated universe; perhaps the coronavirus is simply a sign that whoever is running it got a bit bored?
Or that if we upgraded our planet's Norton subscription and job done 🤔, virus gone...
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
The magic money forest is getting another seeing to.
Plus upto £3,000 per month grant to businesses asked to close
There is no way this is going to be a fortnights closure.
Five million unemployed by Christmas. Minimum.
I doubt it. Furloughed but not unemployed.
LOL. If you think all these businesses can keep limping along indefinitely on Government life support then I have a garden bridge to sell you.
These lockdowns tend to follow a pattern. Outbreak occurs, testing squads descend, more disease found, restrictions applied, more testing, more disease, restrictions tightened again, etc., etc. To borrow a term I read elsewhere, it becomes Hotel California lockdown - you get into it, you never leave.
If - when - the hospitality trade in the whole of Northern England finds it has no date for reopening but it's unlikely to be before May 2021, then it just rolls over and dies. End of story.
An interesting field for prediction (does anyone offer odds?) is where the UK national debt (currently just over 2 tn) will be at its high point from now, say over the next 2,5,10 year term. Would it be absurd to think that 3 tn -3.5 tn is realistic in the 5-10 year term? 3.1 tn would be neat, coming out at £100,000 per UK income tax payer.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
The premier league has announced that they are showing games that were not to be show live on TV. They will now be on Sky box office and Bt box office for £14.95. Do not know how successful that will be as people already pay a lot to watch through their normal subscription.
I will not pay anymore to Sky or BT for my sports packages
It also seems highly likely that with the impending reduction in earnings, notwithstanding the government schemes, Sky and BT may well see big drops in their subscription numbers anyway
Agreed , also I would guess drops in pubs subscriptions with further local lockdowns. I read today that Scottish supporters were thrown out of pubs at 10pm missing their penalty shoot out win.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
The magic money forest is getting another seeing to.
Plus upto £3,000 per month grant to businesses asked to close
There is no way this is going to be a fortnights closure.
Five million unemployed by Christmas. Minimum.
I doubt it. Furloughed but not unemployed.
LOL. If you think all these businesses can keep limping along indefinitely on Government life support then I have a garden bridge to sell you.
These lockdowns tend to follow a pattern. Outbreak occurs, testing squads descend, more disease found, restrictions applied, more testing, more disease, restrictions tightened again, etc., etc. To borrow a term I read elsewhere, it becomes Hotel California lockdown - you get into it, you never leave.
If - when - the hospitality trade in the whole of Northern England finds it has no date for reopening but it's unlikely to be before May 2021, then it just rolls over and dies. End of story.
Only complete and utter collapse will get these deranged lunatics to change policy. even then, I am not so sure. Its getting more and more like effing east Germany by the day.
Its over. its bloody over. The only thing that will stop it now is complete economic collapse. Still, that's closer now than it was, I guess.
Who's on board for this exciting new financial services offer? I might sell all my cars and get on board with some magic bean futures.
Sometimes I really start looking for the universe's on/off switch.
Some scientists believe that we are all really living in some kind of computer simulated universe; perhaps the coronavirus is simply a sign that whoever is running it got a bit bored?
Or that if we upgraded our planet's Norton subscription and job done 🤔, virus gone...
Could they possibly try turning it off and turning it on again? BTW George Berkeley, one of the most entertaining and readable of philosophers, held an 18th century version of that view.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
I think it was due to posting in concert with betting markets which made it not only misleading but potentially financially ruinous.
You're allowed to post subsamples, so long as you clearly post 'This is a subsample'
Ah, thank you very much - I really had wondered.
Tories used to use 18 person subsamples to prove that they were going to be Scottish government and Ruthie would be FM.
They still do here (well, different numbers and no Ms D any more, but the principle ior lack thereof is the same).
If Trump is doing so much worse with women, seniors and independents as multiple sources of data seem to indicate, then this is not going to be close at all. Watch out for MO and Alaska at this rate.
I have a highly speculative, just for fun bet on Alaska.
Of course if it come of I will loudly trumpet my genius and if it fails I have already established it doesn't count.
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
The magic money forest is getting another seeing to.
Plus upto £3,000 per month grant to businesses asked to close
There is no way this is going to be a fortnights closure.
Five million unemployed by Christmas. Minimum.
I doubt it. Furloughed but not unemployed.
LOL. If you think all these businesses can keep limping along indefinitely on Government life support then I have a garden bridge to sell you.
These lockdowns tend to follow a pattern. Outbreak occurs, testing squads descend, more disease found, restrictions applied, more testing, more disease, restrictions tightened again, etc., etc. To borrow a term I read elsewhere, it becomes Hotel California lockdown - you get into it, you never leave.
If - when - the hospitality trade in the whole of Northern England finds it has no date for reopening but it's unlikely to be before May 2021, then it just rolls over and dies. End of story.
Likewise Scotland, Wales, Ulster, central London. Fucked. The entire tourist industry: shagged.
There is a danger that we will tip into an economic death spiral, as bankruptcy causes defaults which causes more bankruptcy which.....
The Extreme Worst Case Scenario.
And even as I write this, cold, torrential, apocalyptic rain has just started falling on north London
Lovely sunny autumn day here in SE Scotland. You were saying about the superiority of the London climate? (Much overrated IMO - hot, sweaty, and going to get much worse in future summers, with near-perennial drought added.)
I think I’ll stick with the spanish restrictions and an unfazed attitude to case rates of around 100/100,000 the late night social industry is suffering and the lack of relative and second home owners is causing pain across the board. But if I wanted to I could eat and drink till 1am. Obviously things are different in Madrid and a couple of other areas.
In other news, I totally missed this...I can't imagine they will have much of a business if you can only get a vodaphone contract, when the whole point of CW was a one-stop shop that you could choose from a large array of network / tariff.
EE phone deals are no longer available at Carphone Warehouse - here are some alternatives
We have been with Vodafone Spain since we moved here in 2009. Paid around 60€ a month then plus call and text charges on top - even a 5 second call cost several cents a minute plus a 28 cent 'connection charge! For the past 2 years our new contract with them has free calls/texts and unlimited data with 4G for €50 a month which is for two separate lines!
I am semi seriously considering this. Just get out of Britain. Fly to Cuba. Stay there six months. The food is shite but the ladies are lithe. If we're all going to hell, why not do it somewhere nice and sunny and warm.
Given that literally everyone I know with children at university has a tale of their children, their childrens' flatmates/housemates, or bubble mates testing positive I am not at all surprised at the stats.
But again, of all those dozens and dozens of people (because I'm hearing of bubbles, flats, housemates, yeargroups), none has been hospitalised although I appreciate it is more nuanced than that.
The great fear, of course, is that it starts to spread more rapidly from the student incubators into the general population and the death rate starts to rocket. All efforts need to be devoted into stopping this from happening.
This the only reason I think a circuit break might actually do anything productive.
A circuit break is in itself probably absolutely bloody useless. The only thing I can think of though is so long as the students remain where they are that this circuit break might potentially allow time for the virus to burn out amongst students without transferring from students to the wider community as much.
I doubt it though. I'm not optimistic that a circuit break will do anything other than put in restrictions that will end up being extended before the end of the fortnight.
We are still almost ten per cent short of where the economy was in February,
Now Sunak wants to put the patient back into a coma with borrowed money.
FFS wake up. We are oing to end up with an economy permanently 10/15 per cent smaller than it was, with far, far larger debt mountain to try to sustain.
It is not going to effing work. We are looking at a bloody catastrophe the like of which we have never seen. For a disease that prays on 82 year olds.
It's a relief to hear that only 82 year-olds are affected. I didn't know this. Open up everything now in that case.
Just come back from a walk to find this. On behalf of my fellow 82 year olds I think that everything possible should be done to prevent the spread of this disease. At least until next May, when I shall be 83, and safe!
Employees who work for UK firms forced to shut by law because of coronavirus restrictions will get two-thirds of their wages paid for by the government.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscrae looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the pu (3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
Thank you; it's appreciated.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
Good posts Andy C. Don't agree with your entire analysis but it is better and more detailed than 90% of the stuff on, say, the BBC website, or in the broadsheets
One tale re testing. It is now pretty good in places. A close family member of mine needed a test last weekend. It was booked on Saturday evening, the test was done 10am next morning at a walk in centre, there was zero waiting time, the test took 15 minutes, the results were emailed within less than 24 hours: negative
It was really rather efficient.
Thanks, LadyG. Testing is the route to living with it, if we need to for a prolonged period. I think that results need to be available within an hour if possible (because that allows a lot more things to be possible) and even more widely available.
But from everything I've read on the vaccine effort, we WILL get a working and workable vaccine. By the end of next summer, we'll probably be able to pick and choose vaccines for ease of administration, availability, efficacy, and minimalisation of side effects.
Yes, absent good, globally available vaccines, the magic bullet is probably universal testing, with results returned in minutes. Basically: instant
Then you can be given your daily I AM CLEAN visa, and you are allowed to work, go to the pub, attend school or uni, keep the economy going,
It will be a bit shit for those who test positive, but then it is shit for everyone already
In which case the test needs to be a lick and stick. No way that the deep throat and nostril jobby is going to become a daily routine. I'd rather stay housebound than be doing that.
Comments
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1314229493675044865?s=20
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1314227690329772034?s=20
Bugger.
In the last week or so he has backed the 10pm curfew, criticised it, & abstained on the vote - that's the man for you
Fox poll, true, but has Trump 3 over Biden in Florida.
It's not as though his being unable to drive would change things.
There were cheaper ones, but they were unmanned and populated by druggies, crack whores, general hookers, chavs, and kids drinking white lightning.
Paying the £20 to avoid them was worth it.
I'd love to think we could just have people carry out behavioural change off their own bat to minimise risks to others. But isn't that exactly what we've been trialling since the end of July? The ONS numbers and the hospitalisation numbers aren't helpful to that.
And it still doesn't do anything about the fact that we're almost at saturation with hospital beds in some areas of the country already, and a big increase in cases - even amongst the younger and less vulnerable (they're currently concentrated in the 16-24 age band according to the ONS survey) - will see a big increase in hospitalisations.
We're already crowding out non-covid cases in hospitals; the current level isn't really sustainable (at c. 20,000 infections per day). We need to sustain well over 100,000 per day to get herd immunity within a year from now. That's melt-down levels for the NHS for any more than brief surges.
Not to mention the lingering effects for way too many, and the expiration of immunity over time.
I think there would be routes to living with the virus, but that would involve rapid, easy, and ubiquitous testing - the route of surrendering to it and letting it in as widely as possible just doesn't add up.
So a stable R above 1 means "Things are getting worse at an accelerating rate, due to compounding" but not "Things are getting worse at an increasing rate, more than just compounding"
Nevertheless more fair minded people are thinking he is better than our current PM.
One of the reasons why LAB is only level not 60% clear of this useless government which is where they should be!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8822715/1-000-AI-scanners-monitoring-close-pedestrians-walking-other.html
One tale re testing. It is now pretty good in places. A close family member of mine needed a test last weekend. It was booked on Saturday evening, the test was done 10am next morning at a walk in centre, there was zero waiting time, the test took 15 minutes, the results were emailed within less than 24 hours: negative
It was really rather efficient.
Blood plasma from three Singaporeans who recovered from COVID-19 was used to treat U.S. President Donald Trump after he shocked the world by announcing he was infected with a disease he’d played down all year.
Trump was treated with antibodies obtained from plasma supplied by Singapore’s National Centre for Infectious Diseases while being treated at the Walter Reed Medical Center before he left Monday night, eastern U.S. time. It was unclear whether his infected wife, First Lady Melania Trump, received the same treatment.
https://coconuts.co/singapore/news/singaporean-blood-given-to-treat-covid-infected-donald-trump/
Like most if not all social ills a program of education would be imo immensely helpful to aid compliance or adherence to best practice. As we all agree and have seen, people who care voluntarily adopt harsher measures and did so pre-official lockdown.
A campaign to explain what the transmission risks are, what can be done to minimise those risks, and what to do if you have symptoms would go a long way to help.
But don't we have those already? Well yes we do but we have them in the context of a near-infantilised population who, like infants everywhere, rebel against constrictions or "the rules" once they get half a chance to do so.
Relaunch the campaigns of information while telling the public you seek to trust them and perhaps you will get a different response.
You might as well say he's got better relationships with his family than Caligula.
The app, which launched two weeks ago, has been used for millions of check-ins at restaurants, bars and pubs, where people scan a QR code at the entrance to the venue." (£)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/nhs-tracing-app-has-sent-one-outbreak-alert-68h6vcs30
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/covid-isn-t-why-trump-losing-seniors-support-it-isn-ncna1242672
If Trump is doing so much worse with women, seniors and independents as multiple sources of data seem to indicate, then this is not going to be close at all. Watch out for MO and Alaska at this rate.
I agree that more people are paying attention to the VPs this time given the age/health of the 2 main players and that was reflected in higher viewing figures.
Where I disagree is that you seem to be assuming that this all works to the GOP's advantage whereas the only two national polls I've seen on the VP debate both had Harris ahead by some way, hugely so amongst women.
Your evidence to the contrary seems to rest on a focus group run by Frank Luntz, a well known professional Republican strategist.
Do you have anything other than "gut feelings" to substantiate the idea that those watching preferred Pence?
Only one alert after 16 million downloads does seem to be world beating.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54481817
The magic money forest is getting another seeing to.
Well, yes. That's why I considered the constant rate infection options (de facto and de jure restrictions).
Some are, however - the ones who say "remove restrictions for the young while protecting the old separately" - that definitely is "let it rip among the young."
Just as it is a mischaracterisation (plain wrong in fact) to say Peter Hitchens refuses to accept the restrictions and encourages people to break them - in fact he complies with them whilst remaining critical, and says others should too. He is critical of the loony fringe of lockdown sceptics/conspiracy theorists, and says they hurt his cause.
It is actually quite a long list if you bother to take the time to reflect and think. Granted, the positives come nowhere near to matching the negatives, but that fact does not negate the fact that there are positives if we can just be bothered to see and grasp them.
https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1314400288225161216
A pity the Government can't work out that closing hospitality isn't going to help reduce the rate, given the lack of evidence that hospitality significantly spreads COVID
On the face of it that's a lot better than the Trump-Biden polls.
However, at the moment (fingers crossed) Biden doesn't have the virus. Trump does. So the matchup that might count is Pence-Biden. But we don't know if Biden's vote is more an anti-Trump vote than Trump's is a personal pro-Trump vote.
Testing is the route to living with it, if we need to for a prolonged period. I think that results need to be available within an hour if possible (because that allows a lot more things to be possible) and even more widely available.
But from everything I've read on the vaccine effort, we WILL get a working and workable vaccine. By the end of next summer, we'll probably be able to pick and choose vaccines for ease of administration, availability, efficacy, and minimalisation of side effects.
Then you can be given your daily I AM CLEAN visa, and you are allowed to work, go to the pub, attend school or uni, keep the economy going,
It will be a bit shit for those who test positive, but then it is shit for everyone already
The scheme to last for six months
Seems very generous but no doubt some will say it is not enough
Worst case scenario: we all end up back in lockdown until Easter, and any old people saved from Covid die of starvation when their pensions stop being paid.
The Government bet the farm on suppression. It lost, and the bailiffs have arrived at the gate. This is over. We're finished.
Taking self responsibility and accountability just seems to be a diminishing characteristic in this country.
They will now be on Sky box office and Bt box office for £14.95.
Do not know how successful that will be as people already pay a lot to watch through their normal subscription.
Boris or Hancock will say 'two weeks' on Monday. It will be until April.
But it has to be said that he offers no solutions, just criticises his opposite number - we need more than that
These lockdowns tend to follow a pattern. Outbreak occurs, testing squads descend, more disease found, restrictions applied, more testing, more disease, restrictions tightened again, etc., etc. To borrow a term I read elsewhere, it becomes Hotel California lockdown - you get into it, you never leave.
If - when - the hospitality trade in the whole of Northern England finds it has no date for reopening but it's unlikely to be before May 2021, then it just rolls over and dies. End of story.
We will have the backwash of this for decades, now.
Let's keep the pubs and restaurants open and get rid of the 10pm curfew at the same time -seems a better approach, helps the takeaways too.
Not sure Hancock will understand this obvious sensible move.
https://rcpparking.com/9808#
Oh, but I see it is just a fox local station not from their main polling outfit.
There is a danger that we will tip into an economic death spiral, as bankruptcy causes defaults which causes more bankruptcy which.....
The Extreme Worst Case Scenario.
And even as I write this, cold, torrential, apocalyptic rain has just started falling on north London
EE phone deals are no longer available at Carphone Warehouse - here are some alternatives
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ee-phone-deals-are-no-longer-available-at-carphone-warehouse-here-are-some-alternatives
I read today that Scottish supporters were thrown out of pubs at 10pm missing their penalty shoot out win.
Its over. its bloody over. The only thing that will stop it now is complete economic collapse. Still, that's closer now than it was, I guess.
BTW George Berkeley, one of the most entertaining and readable of philosophers, held an 18th century version of that view.
Of course if it come of I will loudly trumpet my genius and if it fails I have already established it doesn't count.
Cuba is reopening for tourism
https://www.traveldailymedia.com/reopening-now-cuba-opens-to-tourism-as-it-enters-new-normality/
I am semi seriously considering this. Just get out of Britain. Fly to Cuba. Stay there six months. The food is shite but the ladies are lithe. If we're all going to hell, why not do it somewhere nice and sunny and warm.
At least until next May, when I shall be 83, and safe!